Since the Sept 11 attacks, the US has pressed the European Union hard to let it use Swift as a"financial data panopticon" and choke point, according to political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham L Newman. Hong Kong's US dollar Chats has run on Swift messaging since 2009. Had HSBC settled Huawei's payment offshore, the US could still have known - and found a way to punish it.
An alternative to the US-dominated web is sketched out in a recent report by Bank of China Ltd's investment banking unit, written by a former foreign-exchange regulator: Use Cips, China's fledgling Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which settles international claims in yuan and can potentially use its own messaging protocol.
The dollar's exorbitant privilege isn't unshakable. A coalition of US foreign policy targets - orth Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and now China and Hong Kong - may be a nonstarter. But what if the US over-reaches and its own allies revolt? The Europeans bristled after President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran. They could seek to replace correspondent banking - and Swift messaging - with a digital euro based on cryptography. China can internationalise its digital yuan.
The British lender gets more than a third of its revenue from Hong Kong, and endorsed the controversial national security law that China recently imposed on the territory.
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